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I have a user account on a machine where they attempted to log in with the incorrect password via SSH until it triggered "too many authentication failures for X" -- I have access ot the box as the root user, but how do i reset this user accounts login?

I've tried:

faillog -u username -r

but this does not seem to resolve the problem for that user account

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  • 1
    Try this ssh -o PubkeyAuthentication=no user@host to see what happens.
    – quanta
    Aug 8, 2012 at 2:42
  • Just restart sshd and it will clear it up. Source: I set MaxAuthTries to 2, locked an account, restarted sshd, it worked fine. It won't kill existing connections.
    – Michael
    Dec 19, 2012 at 2:24

1 Answer 1

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you can fix this without restarting the ssh service. First figure out if it is really a failed login issues by, 

pam_tally2 -u <user>.

(if its RH5x, pam_tally2 with pam_tally)

If its due to failed login attempts, you can issue the following command to reset the number of login attempts to 0, 

pam_tally2 -r -u <user>
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